by Stephen Frey
“They killed Sara. You work for them. They can make you rich. You said it yourself. All you ever wanted was to be rich. Why should I trust you?”
“I don’t care about money now. I want to do what’s right. I want to protect you.”
“Does protecting me include moving me out of my apartment so you could destroy it searching for information? I told you none of the information I have is there.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My apartment was ripped apart. I went there last night.” She listened carefully to his breathing for any clue to the truth.
He knew what she was thinking. “I didn’t have anything to do with your apartment being ripped apart. You must realize that.” He had to think, fast. He had to win her confidence back. “You told me the Neil Robinson file wasn’t there when I dropped you off at the Sheraton. Why would I rip your apartment apart?”
“Simple. You didn’t believe me.”
“I want to take care of you, Jesse.” Again, rather than respond to her words, he tried to play on her emotions.
“I can take care of myself,” she answered icily.
Todd groaned as he came out of his sleep. Jesse glanced over at the couch and covered the phone’s mouthpiece.
“Who the hell is that?” David asked quickly.
Todd rubbed his eyes, then looked up at Jesse.
She held a finger to her lips. “It’s Todd Colton. I felt I needed protection last night, so I asked him to stay here with me.”
David banged his desk hard with an open palm. “Don’t trust that guy, Jesse. Get away from him. I’m not kidding.”
She heard the smack of his hand hitting the desk. “I told you, I’ll make my own decisions from now on.”
David pressed the receiver to his ear tightly. “Jesse, they have something on you.” He had to tell her now. It was the last chance.
“Something on me?” Her voice suddenly wavered. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. I have to show you in person. I’m telling you, it’s definitely something you don’t want them to use against you.”
Her hand began to shake. “What is it?” But she already had an idea. It could only be one thing.
“Meet me.”
“So someone can shoot me?”
“That’s not going to happen,” he said soothingly. “I have their assurances. You name the place. It can be as public as you want. You can bring Todd if that makes you feel better. I’ve told them you possess incriminating information, but that it is safely stored and that there are instructions with a friend to go to the authorities if anything happens to you. I’ve told them that the information you have would put them behind bars for the rest of their lives. They believed me. They are willing to work out a deal. Perhaps with a large cash payment. This can all work out for the best, Jesse. We can all be safe. I urge you as strongly as I can to consider this option. They believed me, now you have to believe me.”
The bastard. He had been working with them the entire time.
Todd sat up on the couch as he saw the sadness in Jesse’s eyes.
“Name the place, Jesse.” David was insistent.
She felt the emotion hurtling to the surface but choked it back. There was no time for emotion. “The Mercantile Bank branch on York Road just north of the fairgrounds,” she uttered despondently.
“When?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Good. You’re doing the right thing, Jesse.”
Slowly she put the phone down without answering.
“What’s wrong, Jess?” Todd sat down on the bed next to her and gently took her hand.
“Nothing. Everything. Just hug me, Todd, please.”
At ten-fifteen, Jesse and Todd sprinted across York Road, dodging heavy traffic, to the Mercantile Bank branch. They had been watching the building for thirty minutes but had seen nothing to make them wary. Each car that had rolled into the small parking lot had exited, and now the lot was empty. There seemed no reason to be suspicious.
They entered through the glass doors at the front of the building and moved quickly to a counter on one side of the lobby. A guard stood amiably in one corner of the room next to a large fern, hands behind his back. Jesse glanced at the guard, then at the two unoccupied tellers.
“Are you okay?” Todd asked.
“Yes,” she answered without taking her eyes off the door. “You have your gun, right?”
It was the third time she’d asked. “Right here.” He touched his chest.
“Jesse.”
She recognized the voice and whirled around. David stood in a doorway next to the guard.
“Would you come with me, please?” He motioned her toward him.
Jesse heard the glass door swing open and turned quickly back toward the front of the building. A man with long sandy blond hair and a beard and mustache entered the building. She recognized him immediately and grabbed Todd’s hand. “That’s the guy who was in my office that day,” she whispered.
“Jesse, come on,” David called.
“Do you want to get out of here, Jess?” Todd watched Gordon Roth carefully.
“I don’t know.” Her nerves were on fire.
“Is everything all right here, folks?” The guard moved out away from the corner.
“Everything’s fine, sir.” David walked confidently to where Jesse and Todd were. “Hello, Todd.” David’s tone was flat, neither friendly nor unfriendly.
Todd stared at Mitchell. Jesse had cared about him for a short time. But she had seen the error of her ways. Todd had made certain of that.
David turned to Jesse. She was like a cat on a hot tin roof searching for a way down. But there wasn’t any. “Jesse, I saw the way you looked at the man who just walked in. He does work for them. I’m not going to deny that. But he’s here to watch over me, not you. He’s here to make certain I don’t take off with what I’m going to show you.” Though she was doing an admirable job of hiding her emotions she had to be frantic inside. And who could blame her? “Jesse, you and I are going back into a private room I’ve arranged for. The guy isn’t coming back there with us. Todd can watch him while we’re there.”
“You’re crazy.” Who knew what David would try? He had to be desperate at this point.
“There’s nothing I could do to you back there.” He had read her expression. “I know you have lots of questions. Just come back to the room with me and I’ll answer them.”
“Jess, if you want to leave, say the word.” Todd’s eyes flashed quickly from Roth to Mitchell.
“It’s all right.” She had come this far. And she needed to know what David had. “I’ll come with you, David, but Todd’s going to watch that guy. If anything at all out of the ordinary happens, he’s going to have the guard call the police immediately.” She paused. “Todd, if David comes out of there alone, start yelling.” She said the words loudly, so David could hear them.
“I will.”
David nodded. “Fine. Now come on.” He retraced his steps to the doorway and moved into the hallway beyond.
Jesse followed a few feet behind, hesitating at each corner of the hallway, expecting an attack at every turn. But finally they were in a small room together alone, a room normally for people who wanted to be left alone with their safety deposit boxes.
David closed the door. “Have a seat.” He pointed to a chair positioned before a small table. “Don’t worry, Jesse. Nothing is going to happen.” He dropped the information from Edgewood General on the table. “Go ahead. Read it.”
Slowly she sat down at the table and reached for the envelope. She scanned it for just a few seconds, then pushed it away. “I can’t believe you.” Her voice was barely audible. “You saw Becky’s card. You took it from my apartment that night. You went to her office and took my file, didn’t you?”
David said nothing.
“The name of the hospital. The fact that my stepfather was the one who attacked me. Becky knew
all that. It would have all been in the file.” Jesse was suddenly on the verge of tears again. “And after you saw Becky’s file, you went to the hospital and got this.” She pointed at the envelope on the table.
“No. I didn’t get this information.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“I’m not. I wouldn’t. Look, they know your stepfather was the one who attacked you. They know it was his child. And they will tell all of this to your mother, everything, if you choose to go to the authorities.” He shook his head. “They will go so far as to tell your mother that it wasn’t rape. That it was consensual. They know how dedicated your mother is to the Catholic Church. They know what it would do to her if she found out.”
“You bastard!”
“Listen to me, Jesse. It doesn’t matter what you think of me now. What matters is that they have this information and they intend to use it.”
She put her head in her hands, suddenly overwhelmed.
“Jesse, there’s something else I’m supposed to relay to you.”
“What?” She could barely speak.
“They want you to have the proper incentive.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means they want to buy your silence as well as intimidate you. They find that to be an extremely successful strategy. It means a cash payment of two million dollars and lifetime employment at Sagamore.”
“Are you really so naive? I would never have thought that possible.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They’ll never stop trying to get their hands on what I have. On the copy of that check from Doub to the LFA. On Neil Robinson’s information. On everything else. And when they find all of it, and ultimately they will, I’m dead. It’s that simple.”
“But Jesse, if you try to expose them, they’ll show all of that information to your mother. And they’ll publicize it so that everyone in that congregation she values so much will see it too. It will absolutely destroy her. You know it will. Then they’ll kill you anyway. That’s the reality. The alternative is working with them and finding yourself in a very nice position financially. And your mother no wiser to what your stepfather did. They are willing to deal. And they do believe that money can buy silence.”
“I suppose you know that from experience.”
“Jesse, I—”
“How could you do this to me?” she screamed. The chair tumbled backward crashing to the floor as she stood.
They could read people so well. David realized that now. They were master manipulators. He hadn’t thought that the threat of her mother’s learning about the abortion would affect Jesse so deeply, but now, as the tears streamed down her face, he could see he had been dead wrong. She was disintegrating in front of him.
“I thought we were going to go to the authorities together.” She tried to regain her composure for a moment, wiping the tears from her face, but then her shoulders heaved as another tremor racked her body. “I thought we were going to put them away with what we both knew. I so completely misjudged you, David. I can’t believe you gave them the information about my abortion. About the fact that my stepfather . . .” But she couldn’t finish. The image of her mother’s face flashed through Jesse’s mind. The horrified expression. The humiliation.
“I didn’t tell them anything about what happened to you,” he murmured quietly.
“Stop lying to me,” she shrieked.
“I’m not lying.” His face was grim. “Your friend Todd told them. He’s the one who got them the file from the hospital. They’ve taken care of a rather large problem he had.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He owed the mob some money.”
Jesse shook her head slowly. That was preposterous. “God, you’re pathological.” She could no longer believe anything David Mitchell said.
“I should have told you all this before.” David passed a hand through his hair and exhaled heavily. “The evening I was in your apartment and Todd interrupted us, Elizabeth was waiting for me. She wanted me to search your place that night, but I never had a chance because of Todd. She told me it was all routine to investigate someone she planned to make an offer to. That they were just being careful. I knew it was crap, but I was trying to protect my job. When I got into the limousine, she asked me why I had come out so fast. That’s when I told her about Todd. That’s how they found him. Todd has to have been the one who set you up, because it wasn’t me. You said you’ve known him since high school. You must have told him about what happened to you. About the attack, I mean. Todd’s responsible for all this.”
Todd wasn’t capable of something so terrible, Jesse thought to herself. David was. It was as simple as that. “I know you’re lying, David.”
“No, I’m not.” He looked straight into her eyes. “Look, if I could steal this information from them and be certain they wouldn’t kill me too, I’d go to the authorities with you. I swear it. But we’re better off agreeing to what they’ve proposed.”
“You bastard! You gave me away to save yourself. I hate you.” She lunged at him.
But he was too strong for her. He caught her arms and held them against her body as she struggled. Finally, she gave up and he let her go. She raced to a corner of the room and stood there, her back to him, wondering how she would get through this. And then she heard his voice. It was devoid of emotion.
“Don’t screw with them, Jesse. They’re more powerful than you can imagine. You have until eleven o’clock tomorrow morning to respond to their generous offer. I suggest you reply in the affirmative.”
Chapter 32
He stole silently down the hallway toward the small master bedroom, and hesitated for a moment in the darkness outside the door as he withdrew the ether-soaked rag from his pocket. Then he moved into the bedroom purposefully, pushed the rag against Connie Hayes’s sleeping face, and stared down into her petrified eyes through the stocking mesh pulled tightly over his head as she struggled in vain against his strong hold.
It was over quickly. When he was certain she had lapsed into unconsciousness, he removed the rag, put it back in his pocket and began a systematic search of the house.
An hour later, he was rewarded for his determination when the flashlight’s gleam fell on the IRS bag between the stacks of board games and jigsaw puzzles. He pulled it down, unzipped it, and shined the light inside. Pay dirt.
Quickly he removed the pile of papers and transferred them to another bag, then put the IRS bag back where it had been. This discovery was going to make him a rich man. He smiled widely, then looked out the window. First light was just seeping across the horizon.
“We’ve got it.” Mohler slammed down the conference-room phone triumphantly. “Apparently there was quite a pile of stuff. Quite a bit of information. The Doub check to LFA. Information about how we rigged the Coleman Technology IPO through Sagamore, and about how we were trying to manipulate Coleman’s election. Things we definitely would not have wanted out in the open. But now it’s in our hands. Jesse Hayes has nothing left to bargain with.”
Finnerty heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank God.” He turned to his right. “It’s over, huh, Carter?”
Webb rubbed his forehead, then glanced at his watch. Seven-thirty in the morning. “When will we receive the material?” The war wasn’t over yet. He knew that as well as he knew the halls of Congress. It wasn’t even close to celebration time. Only after he held in his own hands what had been taken from Connie Hayes’s home, and Gordon Roth had assured him that Jesse Hayes was dead, would he relax.
“He said he’d arrange a meeting after he spoke with the Hayes woman.” Mohler had convinced himself during the night that it was over, that everything they had built was going to unravel. Now Sagamore seemed safe again.
“He was quite helpful,” Finnerty commented. He turned to his left. “You were right on the button about him, Elizabeth. Good job.”
“Thank you.” She held a hand to her mouth and coughed twice.
“Are you all right?” Finnerty was suddenly concerned. “You look a little pale.”
“I’m fine,” she said softly. “Just a bit tired. It’s been a long night.”
Webb watched her for a moment, then reached inside his suit coat for a cigar. She was hiding something. He had been reading faces too long, and hers was telling a story. He sliced off the cigar tip with his sterling silver cutter and turned to Finnerty. “You can reach Roth at any time, right?”
Finnerty nodded. “Yes. On his cellular.”
“As soon as we hear back, I want him on Jesse Hayes. I want her taken care of as soon as possible.”
“Right, Carter.”
They had moved from the Sheraton to the Towson Motor Inn just to be safe. And fortunately, by means of a small bribe, they’d been able to persuade the man at the front desk to take cash and not a credit card so they couldn’t be traced. Jesse reached for the phone. It was nine-fifty and the deadline would expire in a little over an hour. As the line began to ring at the other end, she glanced at the door. Where the hell was Todd? He had been on the couch when she’d fallen asleep last night, but gone this morning when she awakened at six. She wanted to talk to him before she made the call, but she couldn’t wait for the last second. She’d kept the whole ugly affair to herself this long. She couldn’t let them destroy her mother and her after so much pain.
“Hello,” David answered on the second ring.
“It’s Jesse.”
“Jesse, I have to see you right away.”
He was speaking so softly she could barely hear him. “What are you talking about? I’m calling because the deadline is only an hour away. I’m going to accept what they’ve proposed. What you’ve proposed. I don’t know what choice I have. It would devastate my mother to know everything, and for all her friends to know. It would devastate me too, for God’s sake. I couldn’t handle it. I’ll accept their proposal and learn to live with it. But you can tell them to go to hell with their two-million-dollar bribe.”
